Based on data from March last year that Zdravko Šestak, the director of Podravka, signed a loan agreement which included INA shares as possible payment means, various difficult or completely unprovable theses are being suggested in the media.
The arrested Podravka managers, according to currently available information, can be suspected of the already common ‘business step errors’ in Croatia, or accused of minor criminal offenses, such as making decisions without the knowledge of superiors, exceeding authority, etc. However, the motivation for committing criminal acts in the Podravka affair is questionable, as is the level of the indictment proposal and, indirectly, the levels of individuals alongside the already suspected managers. So far, there is no information that there is any evidence based on which the level of the indictment proposal could be raised to serious criminal offenses and expanded to a higher level of accused individuals, such as Sanader, Polančec, the management of INA, MOL, and the Hungarian OTP Bank, as suggested in the articles published last weekend. Three waves of media manipulation in the Podravka takeover affair should be attributed to the balloons that investigators occasionally release without real evidence in order to somehow obtain information.
